Latino Daily News

POLL: Majority of Cuban-American Youth Oppose Embargo

The majority of young Cuban-Americans not only oppose the embargo against Cuba but are in favor of reestablishing relations with Havana, according to a poll taken by Miami’s Florida International University.

“We’re seeing a clear demographic change - younger people and those who have arrived from Cuba over the past few years favor a change in policy toward the island,” FIU professor Guillermo J. Grenier, one of the directors of the survey released Tuesday, told Efe.

The study found that 62 percent of Cuban-Americans between ages 18-29 oppose continuing the embargo that the United States has imposed on Cuba since 1962.

Sharing that opinion are 58 percent of Cubans of all ages who came to the United States since 1995, according to the survey, the seventh that FIU has taken since 1991.

More than half the Cuban-Americans in Miami-Dade County reject continuing the embargo and 71 percent think it never worked.

Support for the embargo has clearly plummeted from its 84-percent average in the 1990s.

Now 68 percent of the county’s Cuban-Americans want diplomatic relations with the island restored, a percentage that jumps to 90 percent among the youngest respondents.

The general U.S. population has also shown signs of reconciliation, with 56 percent in favor of normalizing relations between their country and Cuba, according to a recent study by the Atlantic Council think-tank.

For its part, the government of President Barack Obama has asked that Cuba’s economic reforms be accompanied by respect for human rights.

Beginning in 2009, Obama began cutting back restrictions on Cuban-Americans traveling to the island and on sending remittances and humanitarian packages to their families there.

According to figures from the 2010 Census, Miami-Dade County is home to the greatest number of Cubans in the United States with 856,007, or 48 percent of all the Cubans in the country, and is at the same time the greatest concentration of Cubans anywhere outside the island.

The FIU survey was taken by telephone in English and Spanish between February and March from among 1,000 Cuban-American adults in Miami-Dade County.